The Mentor: Great American Inventors, Vol. 1, Num. 29, Serial No. 29

Similar to all truly great inventors, he was a man of broad vision and keen imagination. What he was most interested in was not immediate consequences, but ultimate effects, and in working on the complicated mechanical problems with which his mind was incessantly occupied he kept steadily in view their significance to society as a whole. Thus, one of his most ingenious creations--the famous Fulton torpedo, crude forerunner of the deadly submarine missiles of today--was inspired by an ardent desire to produce something that would make war so terrible as to impel mankind to universal peace. And similarly it was with an eye to increasing the welfare and happiness of society that he went to work on the invention with which his name will always be linked,--the steamboat.

He was not the first to whom the idea had occurred of applying the steam engine to purposes of water transportation. Already the Pennsylvanian, William Henry, the Connecticut mechanic, John Fitch, the New Jersey inventor, John Stevens, and the Scotsman, William Symington, had demonstrated more or less successfully the possibility of using steam as a motive power on the water; but it was left to Fulton to establish definitely the value of the steamboat as a medium for passenger and freight traffic. This he did with his historic Clermont, built at New York in 1807, partly with funds provided by Chancellor Livingston and partly by loans from reluctant and skeptical friends.

_In the summer of 1779 Fulton first tried the method of propelling a boat by means of paddle wheels on Conestoga Creek in eastern Pennsylvania._]

The general impression was that Fulton had undertaken a hopeless and visionary task. “As I had occasion,” he himself has related, “daily to pass to and from the shipyard while my boat was in progress, I often loitered unknown near idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repetition of ‘Fulton’s Folly.’”

As everybody knows, the Clermont did not sink or otherwise come to grief when she started up the Hudson, August 11, 1807, for her maiden voyage to Albany. On the contrary, she made the journey, against the wind, at an average rate of nearly five miles an hour; and, with the wind again ahead, returned to New York at about the same speed. Compared with the steaming powers of the modern ocean leviathan, this was a sorry enough showing; but, with the continued success of the Clermont and her sister boats, the Raritan and the Car of Neptune,--which together constituted the world’s first regular line of steamboats,--it was sufficient to prove for all time that man had made another superb advance in the mastery of the forces of Nature.

_Constructed for the Hudson-Fulton celebration at New York in the fall of 1909._]

_A sewing machine of 1851._]

Very different, but also of great value, was the service rendered by Elias Howe of sewing machine fame. There are two stories as to the genesis of this wonderful labor-saving device. One is that it was suggested to Howe by the chance remark of a visitor to the Boston machine shop in which he was employed. The other and more romantic story is that the idea of a machine for sewing garments originated from a desire on Howe’s part to lighten the labor of his wife, who, when he was ill and out of work, was obliged to take in sewing and toil far into the night.

Whichever version is correct, it is certain that in 1843 (Howe was then only twenty-four years old) he set to work in the garret of his father’s home in Cambridge, and about a year later gave to the world a sewing machine that embodied the principal features of the most up-to-date models of the present day. For long, however, the world was reluctant to accept this splendid invention. The tailors of Boston, to whom he first offered it, refused to adopt it, on the ground that it would ruin their business; and later, in New York, there were anti-sewing machine demonstrations, fomented by labor leaders, who failed to realize that in the end labor-saving devices of any real merit were always certain to increase, not decrease, the demand and opportunities for the workingman and workingwoman.

“_It has stitched many hundred miles of seam, and is still in good working order._”]

In the case of the sewing machine the truth of this has long since been demonstrated. Not only has it become a familiar household adjunct, freeing millions of women from the slavery of the needle, and thus most effectively answering the piteous plea of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” but it has also brought about a marvelous expansion of the clothing industry. It has in fact created an entirely new and most important branch of that industry,--the ready-made clothing business,--giving employment to hundreds of thousands of people, and providing well patterned and well finished garments at prices undreamed of in other days. Surely Howe, no less than Fulton and Whitney, deserves to be regarded as a benefactor of humanity.

So, too, with Samuel F. B. Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, the one the father of the electric telegraph, the other the inventor of the telephone. If anybody had told Samuel Morse in 1811, when as a youth of twenty he sailed from New York to Liverpool to study painting under Benjamin West, that he would be known to posterity as an inventor rather than as an artist, he would have laughed the prophecy to scorn. But, as has happened to other gifted men, circumstances conspired to turn and fix the thoughts of this brilliant son of New England on problems unconnected with the routine of his daily life, yet appealing to him with such force as to change the whole course of his career.

With Morse the turning point was reached in 1827 when, some years after his return from England, he attended a course of lectures in New York on the subject of electromagnetism. What he then heard fired his imagination, and led him, during a second visit abroad, to study more closely the nature of electricity. He specially became interested in the possibility of utilizing this great natural force as a medium for long-distance communication, and when homeward bound, in the autumn of 1832, applied himself to this one problem to such good purpose that before landing in New York he was able to show to his fellow passengers plans of the instrument that was to immortalize his name.

_Alexander Graham Bell opening the New York-Chicago long distance telephone line, October 18, 1892._]

It was not until five years afterward, however, that Morse made the first working demonstration of his invention, which by most people was regarded as a scientific toy rather than a creation of the highest practical utility. And a scientific toy it remained until, after a heartbreaking struggle to secure the necessary financial aid, Morse persuaded Congress in 1843 to appropriate $30,000 for the construction of a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. The first message to be flashed over this line, May 1, 1844, was the news of the nomination of Henry Clay for the presidency; and with the sending of that message one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind definitely gained recognition as an accomplished fact.

Alexander Graham Bell, experimenting in the same field of long-distance communication by the aid of electricity, was more fortunate in securing early acknowledgment of the merits of his telephone, a public demonstration of which was given at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Connected with this invention a most interesting story is told. Bell, it is said, was experimenting with a device for multiplex telegraphy, when the accidental snapping of a wire sent a sound vibrating through another wire which had attached to it at each end a thin sheet-iron disk a few inches in circumference. At once Bell asked himself if the sound could be repeated. Experiment showed that it could, and the query then suggested itself to him, Could vocal sounds be thus transmitted? Forthwith he set himself to the task that resulted, after many failures, in the creation of the telephone.